Eggs and Aliens – Fiona’s VO:
I’m very sorry to be unable to join you this afternoon, but I hope my digital voice and these images will suffice.
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This is an entirely subjective look at alchemy, from the first alchemist to alien abduction, via a mad scientist, two spacewomen and a picnic – using some key tools of the alchemist…
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Tool Number One – Symbolism – for instance, here is the Orphic Egg – the cosmic egg from which hatched the primordial hermaphrodite.
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Or here, the ouroboros – an ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. It is often taken to symbolize introspection, the eternal return or a cycle, in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself.
Creation and birth. – death and re-birth.
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Tool Number two, Codes – the language of alchemical texts was written to deliberately cause obstruction and confusion – necessitating translation. And where there is translation there are opportunities, gaps to be filled by the translator.
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And tool number three, the Magnum opus – the search, via experimentation, for the philosopher’s stone. This process involves the transformation of lead into gold – a supposed purification process which, may be used to bring about, the purification of the soul – offering eternal life.
The Magnum Opus is often described as a series of three stages, each represented by a colour: a blackening, a whitening, And finally, rubedo, a reddening.
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Mary the Prophetess – the first alchemist. She lived between the first and third centuries A.D and is credited as having invented key bits of alchemical kit, some of which are still used in laboratories, such as a three-armed beaker, an extractor and, bearing her name still, the bain-marie – the water bath.
Of course, Mary is not the alchemist typically represented in popular culture.
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More familiar is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Dr Victor Frankenstein – A character who trained in both alchemy and modern science, he represents a bridge between the two disciplines.
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Of course, Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, though a relatively sympathetic character, kicked off a now familiar fictional trope, that of the mad scientist, for whom often reanimation or rebirth are goals.
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Driven by ego and the desire to play god, the mad scientist, even when played for laughs, warns of the dangers of messing with nature.
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In Lang’s Metropolis, ‘mad’ scientist Rotwang succeeds in making the Maschinenmensch, a female automaton, who is both alive and dead.
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In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner twenty forty nine, the character of Niander Wallace can create new life both digitally and biologically, and is hardly less theatrical in his performance than previous depictions of mad-scientists. Wallace, like others before him, is thwarted in his ambitions by his inability to crack biological reproduction – his products are, supposedly, sterile.
Reanimation, birth and rebirth are obsessions for male mad-scientists and are reminiscent of alchemists search for the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone.
But what of the female mad scientist?
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An early scientist, certainly considered mad by her contemporaries, was Margaret Cavendish. Margaret mocked the empirical approach of the ROYAL SOCIETY and attacked the practice of vivisection. She questioned the Baconian notion of relentless mechanical progress, in favour of gentler Stoic doctrines. She defined poetry as “mental spinning”, extremely useful to the scientific mind….
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She also produced arguably the first-ever science-fiction story, The Blazing World, which considered the alternative futures of science.
And for her trouble, she was given the nickname “Mad Madge”.”
In The Blazing World, Cavendish uses another world to allow for imaginative development of scientific thinking. Three hundred years later, Scottish writer and socialist Naomi Mitchison, published Memoirs of a Spacewoman, in which a female astronaut, an expert in communication and linguistics, visits other worlds and communicates with beings, so that Mitchison might foreground scientific, societal & philosophical problems of the sixties.
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My favourite female ‘mad’ scientist is Elsa, in Vinchenzo Natali’s Splice. Splice focuses on a couple of super-cool geek scientists – Elsa and Clive, who, kind of-accidently, create a human/non-human animal hybrid which they raise as if their own child.
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The language of the film is the language of the biological laboratory – the genetic code – barely translated for the viewer and delivered as fast-paced jargon reminiscent of screw ball comedies made in the forty’s, such as Bringing Up Baby.
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Emphesising the ‘madness’ and ego of Elsa is a scene in which she appears ambivalent towards having a ‘real’ child, as pregnancy would interrupt her already stellar career and because she appears squeamish at the thought of her own biological pregnancy.
In an attempt to procreate outside of her body, Elsa merges her genetic material with the genetic material of various animals and creates her own monster/child.
A hermaphroditic homunculus, straight from a mechanical Orphic Egg.
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The appearance of twelve ‘eggs’ on Earth, heralds a new age of universal communication in Denis Villeneuve’s twenty sixteen first contact film Arrival.
These eggs appear to be spaceships, but are maybe more akin to holes in space and time. Within these structures there is a membrane or screen, upon which radial aliens (beings with seven points, named heptapods) attempt to communicate with communication expert and linguist Louise, using a series of complex circular symbols, apparently made of inky black smoke.
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Early attempts at spoken and written communication between Louise and the aliens are somewhat ludicrous, but once the spacesuit is off…
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…the squid-like beings begin to make circular shapes, like coffee stains, or the ouroboros, on the membrane. Theirs is a non linear autography, and the humans wonder if the beings might also think in this circular way.
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Each circle must be decoded, as every curl and splat are part of a nuanced and detailed language. A little like logograms, or the mechanism of gene expression, these circular patterns can be interpreted in multiple ways, like the mutable meanings of alchemical language.
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Eventually, Louise is able to communicate with the aliens in their own language, but this starts to effect the way that Louise thinks. The circular communications, based on the seven-pointed radial shape, which influence their experience of their environment, and also, as it turns out, their experience of time, has a similar effect on Louise, who starts to experience her life in a non-linear way. She sees the future, the past and the present in the wrong order, or perhaps simultaneously.
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It’s acknowledged that Arrival is based on Ted Chiang’s two thousand and two first-person short story, Story of Your Life. In it, Chiang uses different tenses, mixing future, past and present to weave the complex non-linear knot of Louise’s life.
But no one has yet made clear the debt that Chiang’s premise appears to owe to Naomi Mitchison’s nineteen sixty two novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
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In it, Mitchison’s astronaut is, like Louise, an expert in communication, travelling on quests to make contact with other conscious life-forms. On her first mission she observes, lives amongst and communicates with a group of five-pointed radial creatures, and discovers that their body shape influences the way they think.
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Over time, the spacewoman becomes less able to think in binaries or make distinctions or decisions. She feels herself merging in an all-sided relationship with the alien beings. This new way of thinking starts to erode what she understood as her personality, and her ability to think, ‘rationally’. By the time she returns to her spaceship, she is unable to say yes or no. She is unable to speak.
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The egg-like craft in Arrival are reminiscent of other fictional monolithic structures which appear to alter conventions of space and time…
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The landscape of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, for instance.
The novel focuses on a group of female students at an Australian girls’ boarding school who inexplicably vanish at Hanging Rock while on a picnic. The events depicted in the novel are entirely fictional, but it is framed as though it is a true story, corroborated by ambiguous pseudo-historical references.
Published in sixty seven, and translated into Peter Weir’s film version in seventy five, there is something fundamentally alchemical about Lindsay’s and Weir’s narrative and imagery.
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Here, Hanging Rock is the alchemist’s ancient base metal which may be transformed or purified. Or perhaps Hanging Rock acts as the universal solvent – a catalyst for a change of state for itself and those who climb it.
It is also the Orphic Egg – having witnessed the birth of civilization, of the Aboriginal people. And it is the ouroboros, as on the rock, time appears to eat its own tail:
“It is happening now. As it has been happening ever since Edith Horton ran stumbling and screaming towards the plain. As it will go on happening until the end of time. The scene is never varied by so much as the falling of a leaf or the flight of a bird. To the four people on the Rock it is always acted out in the tepid twilight of a present without a past. Their joys and agonies are forever new.’
The rock is the site of alchemical process, and the arrival of the picnickers marks the red phase, the final phase of the magnum opus, resulting in the philosopher’s stone and eternal life.
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The egg-shape is used throughout the novel and Weir’s film, here framing and reflecting Miranda, who will never return from Hanging Rock.
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And seen later, as she is remembered by her adoring friend, placed in an egg-shaped frame – as if still forming, ready to be re-birthed…
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The narrative is littered with symbolic colours and animals, particularly when set on the rock.. As they climb, the rock itself becomes changeable and labyrinthine, as if regressing into its former liquid state. Like the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining, it is repetitious and impossible to map.,
“On the steep southern façade the play of golden light and deep violet shade revealed the intricate construction of long vertical slabs; some smooth as giant tombstones, others grooved and fluted by prehistoric architecture of wind and water, ice and fire. Huge boulders, originally spewed red hot from the boiling bowels of the earth, now come to rest, cooled and rounded in forest shade.”,
“Miranda was the first to see the monolith rising up ahead, a single monstrous egg perched above a precipitous drop to the plain.”
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Animals associate with the girls – an eagle, bronze beetles and a snake – indicating that they are becoming closer to nature as they climb, transforming.
On the rock, the novel’s text evokes the equipment of the laboratory – the copper coil and the stereoscopic clarity of a powerful telescope – as if the schoolgirls have unknowingly become part of an experiment…
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As they climb, Marion looks down at the rest of the picnic party below, and wonders, as if speaking as an observer of something she no longer recognises:
‘A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Although it’s possible, of course, that they performing some necessary function unknown to themselves.’
A little earlier, ‘Peering down between the boulders, Irma could see the glint of water and tiny figures, coming and going, through drifts of rosy smoke or mist’.
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Back at Appleyard College, headmistress Miss Appleyard is driven to drink, as the scandal of the missing students destroys her school’s reputation. She reminisces of seaside holidays in Bournemouth, a place she loves because ‘it never changed, not in 40 years’. Miss Appleyard is coloured in black, white and red, signalling the stages of the magnum opus, and yet she is the antithesis of the alchemist’s desire for transformation. Unable to adapt to the changing landscape, in every sense, she has to die.
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The observation made through the rosy smoke, or mist, has been interpreted by some as indicative of the presence of aliens. In addition to the rosy smoke, the shape of the monolith is similar to that of a spaceship or UFO, described in accounts of alien abduction. Accounts of alien abduction often involve gaps in the abductee’s experience of time, and time is played around with throughout both the novel and Weir’s film version of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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Alchemical-like codes and symbols are frequently interpreted as evidence of alien contact by new age pseudo-scientists, and are often proposed in conjunction with the merest wisps of scientific fact.
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The internet is littered with conspiracy theories and documentary-like videos, like this one, which attempts to link accounts of extraterrestrial abduction, ‘experiments’ on human DNA (which reveal the code to be a human/alien hybrid) and visual signs, many alchemical in origin.
By conflating the symbols of alchemy and the signs of alien contact, evidence of extra terrestrials can be found everywhere. The utilization of pseudo-scientific language, reminiscent of the proto-scientific codes of the alchemist, is evidence of no more than the continued ubiquity and mutability of the alchemist’s language and the very human desires to find evidence, to seek order and in so doing, to be understood and to understand.
Thank you.
